


Leaves Don't Drop (They Just Let Go)

by slash4femme



Category: NCIS
Genre: Angst, M/M, Some Minor Language, Violence and Blood, some sensuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-07
Updated: 2015-05-07
Packaged: 2018-03-29 11:12:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3894226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slash4femme/pseuds/slash4femme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a relationship in the details</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leaves Don't Drop (They Just Let Go)

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written in 2010. I do not edit my older work, I merely upload it here. It is ubeta'd, sorry folks. for [](http://nakeisha.livejournal.com/profile)[nakeisha](http://nakeisha.livejournal.com/) because I missed her birthday by about three months but also because I am constantly grateful for her winning me over to this pairing many years ago.

_I am the fool who’s life’s been spent between what is said and what is meant._

I.

Dr. Donald Mallard marks his life in photographs. They decorate the parlor, clustered together on the side tables and next to the sofa. They run up the wall the whole length of the staircase. The walls of the library are sprinkled with them and there are a choice few on the side table in Ducky’s bedroom. There are pictures of his parents, of Ducky as a small child and then as an awkwardly proportioned teenager. There are pictures of his family together on holidays, old and stiff and yellowed at this point. There are pictures of Ducky with schoolmates, with professional colleagues, with friends and old lovers. There are pictures of Ducky in suits at other peoples’ weddings, in uniform, in a lab coat. There are pictures from generations worth of Christmases, Thanksgivings, weddings and baptisms. There are pictures of Ducky with his old cricket team, pictures of Ducky’s mother and her dogs, pictures of all the people he’d worked with since joining NCIS.

For better for worse every part of Ducky’s life has been documented through photographs.

Leroy Jethro Gibbs has very few pictures. Over the years he’s gotten rid of most of them. Every divorce is ‘celebrated’ by getting rid of all of the photographs of himself and which ever ex-wife it is this time. He’s never had a lot of photos from his childhood; his Dad has most of those. He has a couple of himself with those his considered friends over the years. He has one of Ducky in his study next to his ancient laptop computer. In the photo Ducky is leaning over a desk covered in papers and photographs. He is wearing a lab coat, glasses perched on the end of his nose, and his is looking up as if startled by the photographer’s presence. It’s about twenty years old. It is the only picture of Ducky Jethro owns.

Ducky has a picture of Gibbs too. It is the only picture of him separately, although he also appears in a large number of Ducky’s group photos. Jethro’s hands are shoved in his pockets, hair buzzed. He is grinning at the camera as if he’s just been caught doing some he wasn’t supposed to be, leaning casually against a doorframe. Most people wouldn’t know these days that the door he is leaning against is to one of the old FBI lab’s offices. The picture is just about twenty years old and Ducky has it hanging on the wall in his bedroom.

 

II.

“They’re, umm . . .” Ducky doesn’t quite know what to say. Not that he doesn’t like flowers because he loves freshly cut flowers and he also is quite fond of sunflowers. These ones however are limp, shriveled and mostly dead.

Gibbs stuffs his hands in his pockets and looks unhappy, “I got them on my lunch break.”

Ducky nods in sudden understanding, Gibbs had been ambushed on his way to the office from picking up lunch, it had ended in a car chase which had ended in a stand off which had finally led to end of a very long case. However no flowers were meant to withstand four hours in a hot car at the height of a Virginia summer.  
“Just throw them out.” Gibbs rubs one hand cross his forehead and turns towards the door heading for the elevator to go back up from autopsy and finish his paperwork.

“Thank you.” Ducky calls to his retreating back.

Ducky sighs as he closes the door to his house behind him. He struggles out of his dress jacket, hanging it up and then looks at the pitiful collection of sunflowers he’s holding in his other hand. Even the leaves have shriveled he notes. He sighs again and then heads towards the bathroom.

“Ducky?” Gibbs lets himself into the house.

“In the sitting room Jethro.” Ducky calls and Gibbs head left and then stops short in the doorway.

Ducky raises his eyebrows and takes another sip of his tea. Gibbs is staring at the table in front of the sofa, which contains a vase of sunflowers. The sunflowers are still a little bedraggled, some of them flopping downwards a little more then they should be. The whole arrangement looks a little less pristine, a little less nice then the other cut flowers scattered around the room. They are definitely alive through.

“You didn’t throw them out.” Gibbs says after a long moment and Ducky smiles, putting down his tea.

“I decided to give them another try at life.” Gibbs crosses the room and comes to sit beside him and Ducky reaches out to lightly touch one drooping yellow flower. “Not to give up until there is no hope left.” He says quietly, a small smile one his face and Gibbs reaches out and takes his hand.

 

III.

When they cook dinner together Gibbs always handles the meat and Ducky cooks the vegetables. Gibbs almost always grills the meat and Ducky isn’t that fond of this particularly form of preparing food but he’s learned to be used to it and Gibbs isn’t bad at it.

After dinner they go for a walk. Exercise helps with the digestion, Ducky insists, as he links their arms together. It also helps one keep fit and good looking and Gibbs laughs at that and pats his hand.

“When I retire.” Ducky says suddenly the middle of a monolog about the history of road building dating back to ancient Rome, “I think I would like to go one of those fabled American road trips.”

Gibbs stares at him and Ducky pushes his hands into his pockets. They are standing together on a small bridge that crosses a stream in the middle of the small park down the street from Gibbs’ house. Ducky looks down at the water, and he has been all over the world in his life but there is a lot of America he has never seen before. Even so he knows he is a little old for such things. Gibbs is very quiet and standing very close to him so that their shoulders almost touch. It is the end of summer and it will start getting colder soon, even now it is getting colder in the evenings. Ducky doesn’t shiver but he is glad the other man is as close as he is.

“Yeah?” Gibbs says finally, “maybe I’ll go with you then.”

Ducky looks up at him and smiles.

 

IV.

There is a rather unattractive painting of a bowl of lilies hanging over the sofa in Gibbs den. The lilies are pilled in blue bowl and the bowl is set on what looks like drapes of gold and white cloth. It is set in a cheep plastic frame. Gibbs will when questions fully acknowledge it looks out of place hanging over his large, lush, leather sofa.

He also keep a small cardboard box behind is socks in his dresser drawer. The box as a bullet in it, and Gibbs hasn’t so much as looked at it in years. What had made that time special from all the other times he’d been shot was that he remembers what had happened immediately afterwards more then he remember the event itself.

“Idiot.” Ducky’s lips had been pressed together in a thin white line. “Damn it, Jethro.”

There had been blood everywhere, and Gibbs had been half sitting, half lie on the bathroom floor. There was gauze, surgical tape, cotton wool, and rubbing alcohol balanced on the edge of the bathtub, and Gibbs couldn’t stop staring at these things all nicely lined up. He holds a bottle of whisky with his good arm, half propped against his thigh. Ducky swears again, using long surgical tweezers to slowly pry the bullet out of Gibbs’ left shoulder.

“You could go to the hospital like a normal person.” Ducky hisses at him and Gibbs just shakes his head, no, and tries to lift the whisky bottle to his lips and doesn’t quite make it. “If the government tells you to do things so illegal that you can’t go to a hospital for proper medical care-” Ducky breaks off as he finally pries the bullet out and Gibbs cries out, the sound loud but dulled as it bounces off the walls back at them, “You say no.”

Ducky tosses the tweezers and bullet into the bathroom sink, metal hitting porcelain, and reaches for the cotton and gauze.

There is blood on Ducky’s trousers, Gibbs notes, his blood, and he feels rather sick all of a sudden and fights down nausea.

“You might have a death wish.” Ducky presses cotton and gauze to Gibbs’ shoulder, “but some of us still do value your life.” Ducky glares at him and Gibbs thinks dimly that Ducky looks beautiful. At least as beautiful as a forty year old man covered in blood and glaring like next time he just might kill Gibbs himself can look and Gibbs tries to smile reassuringly at him and passes out instead.

Months late Ducky takes a painting class that he thoroughly enjoys even if he is, by his own admission, truly abysmal at. For his finally assignment he does a still life in oil paint. He shows it to Gibbs of course when the class is over and they sit together studying it on the couch. Gibbs can’t deny it’s slightly hideous, although not the travesty against good taste Ducky seems to think it is. Although after a couple gin and tonics they both admit it starts to have a certain charm. Ducky wants to throw it out, but Gibbs chooses to hang it up over the sofa instead.

 

V.

When he was younger he had been the kind of man that men courted Ducky had told him once. Other men had vied for his attention, and Gibbs could understand that Ducky being smart, well off, “pretty.” Ducky had said with a roll of his eyes, and a slightly smile touching his lips, “money and brains will only get you so far Jethro, no it was my looks that made them want-” Ducky had broken off as the fax machine began spitting reams of paper onto Ducky’s desk and they had both leans forward to study it.

“I used to feel slightly wicked,” Ducky tells him another time. “For taking a lover so much younger then myself.”

“Yeah?” Gibbs reaches out brushes Ducky’s hair way from his forehead takes the other man’s drink out of his hands, subtly moving them closer together on the couch as he does it. “Do you ever still feel like that?”

Ducky’s eyes narrow slightly, but his smile is playful as he reaches cross both of them for his drink now is Gibbs’ hand. Their fingers brush together a he takes it and Ducky’s smile widens. “Oh yes,” Ducky raises the glass to his lips again, “sometimes.”

 

VI.

“You still are.” Ducky looks up at Gibbs who is sitting at Ducky’s desk in autopsy, feet propped up, arms folded. Ducky shakes rain off of his coat, and unwinds his scarf, putting it and his hat on the coat rack by the door.

“I am what Jethro?” He asks brushing hair out of his face as the other man stands.

“Pretty.” Gibbs says and crosses the space between them.

_To the words and how they live between us, and to us and how we live between the words._

 

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
**Notes:**  
1 first quote from _There is a Tree_ by Carrie Newcomer  
2\. ending quote from _Two Toasts_ by Parker Palmer


End file.
